Kathie Kay

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/apr/14/guardianobituaries.arts...

Guardian Obituary

Kathie Kay

Effervescent singer with the Billy Cotton Band

Alan Clayson

The Guardian, Thursday 14 April 2005 00.06 BST

Kathie Kay, who has died aged 86, was a resident vocalist - alongside Alan Breeze - with the Billy Cotton Band. A rich, supple soprano, Kay specialised in sentimental ballads, but was versatile enough to manage comedy routines and singalong medleys. She became a mainstay of Cotton's BBC Saturday night Wakey-Wakey Tavern spectaculars with the formation dancing team, Breeze, pianist Russ Conway and the band itself.
Through that TV show and a Sunday lunchtime BBC Light Programme slot, Cotton sustained a conservative version of 1930s British dance-band style well past its natural life. His secret had been an early appreciation of the power of television.
Kay joined the band in 1957 after her predecessor, Doreen Stephens, became ill. Some on-camera duets with Cotton were issued on disc, and an album, Bill And Kath, sold steadily if unremarkably. Kay's tenure with Cotton also embraced three royal command performances and cabaret before the Queen at Windsor Castle.
Kay, the daughter of a well-to-do Glaswegian family, seemed destined for the Scottish dance palais circuit after a childhood of regional talent contest victories. Unpretentious, effervescent and with an instant rapport with an audience, Kay made inroads into London's variety theatres, and worked with Harry Lauder, George Formby, and Hughie Green. Nevertheless, she was never to uproot herself from Scotland. Indeed, following marriage to impresario Archie McCulloch and the birth of three children, she confined herself professionally to broadcasting and recording.
Though well into her 30s, Kay was visualised as a rival to Pye's Petula Clark by EMI recording manager Wally Ridley, who signed her to the company's HMV subsidiary in 1955. Her debut single, Suddenly There's A Valley, a cover of Gogi Grant's American hit, was eclipsed by versions from Clark, Jo Stafford, Lee Lawrence - and Grant. A similar fate befell her A House With Love In It (1956) and, in 1957, her We Will Make Love lost out to Russ Hamilton's million-seller. She came close to a hit with 1959's mawkish Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye, but was more comfortable on disc with orchestrations of such items as Old Scotch Mother, and Come Home To Loch Lomond And Me.
In any case, records were adjuncts to earnings from the Light Programme, where she was featured singer with Peter Yorke's orchestra until the switch to Billy Cotton. By the late 1970s, Kay had effectively retired from showbusiness. In 1990 she was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.
She is survived by her three sons.

• Kathie Kay (Connie Wood), singer, born November 20 1918; died March 8 2005

References and Sources

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4332859.stm